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SRP Diabetes Retreat

A retreat is organized annually just outside Stockholm for the members of SRP Diabetes. The aim is to increase the interactions between the member research groups. The last years it has been organized jointly with the EndoMet research network at KI.

The meeting is open to PI’s, researchers, postdocs, students and TA staff involved in the Strategic Research Programme in Diabetes both at Karolinska Institutet and Umeå University (SRP Diabetes) and/or the Endocrinology and Metabolism network (EndoMet) at Karolinska Institutet.

Apart from the above confirmed speakers, the program is made up by you, the SRP Diabetes/EndoMet researchers! All participants are thus highly encouraged to submit an abstract!

NEW for this year: You don’t opt for an oral or poster presentation but simply submit an abstract. The internal talks will then be selected from the submitted abstracts and an offer to give an oral presentation will be communicated well in advance. Those not selected for an oral presentation will be offered to present a poster instead. As usual, several short talk slots will be open for junior researchers like doctoral students and postdocs.

The retreat is funded with support from SRP Diabetes, EndoMet research network and MetEndo doctoral programme why we can offer you attendance free of charge (!), however registration, which is binding, is required. There is a limited number of rooms and seats at the venue why first come, first served apply.

Recap from the 2017 retreat

May 4-5, 2017 the 7th retreat was organized, again at the conference center “Vår Gård”, just outside Stockholm with 185 participants, 17 internal presentations and more than 50 science posters! Plus several posters presenting research groups and infrastructures! This event was sponsored also by the doctoral programme in metabolism and endocrinology (MetEndo), and featured internationally recognized external speakers such as Mark H Ellisman (UCSD), Ruth Loos (Mount Sinai), Steven R Smith (Florida) and Olle Melander (Lund University) with great talks covering advanced microscopy, human genetics on obesity, epigenetic regulation of adipose tissue and novel insights on endocrine disturbances in diabetes and cardiovascular disease. We celebrated Professor Emeritus John Wahren (KI) for his 80th birthday who gave an outstanding keynote lecture on “Metabolic Studies in Humans: Usefulness of the A-V Balance Technique”. Highly appreciated were also the talks by our junior researchers! For a review, see the retreat program for 2017 here.

A recap from the 2016 retreat

Our last retreat was at May 12-13 - and is by now a well-established forum at KI - the 6th retreat of SRP Diabetes together with the EndoMet (Endocrinology and Metabolism) research network at KI! We are very glad that the meeting had an all-time high with 170 registered participants and perhaps was the best retreat so far, judging from the scores in the feedback survey! The venue was this time “Vår Gård” in Saltsjöbaden just outside Stockholm, a place that most people liked very much, conveniently reached by the local train just 30 mins from the city center. Six external speakers – Emilio Hirsch (Italy), Ulf Ahlgren (Umeå), Tina Vilsbøll (Denmark), Mattias H Tschöp (Germany), Matthias Blüher (Germany) and Sander Kersten (Netherlands) gave very interesting lectures on cell signaling in growth, pancreas 3D imaging, gut hormones, novel chimeric hormones as diabetes treatments, obesity and lipid metabolism. Many interesting internal talks were also given, see the Retreat program for 2016.

This year the”Best short talk award” was given by the audience to Olof Lagerlöf for “The nutrient sensor OGT in PVN neurons regulates feeding”, best poster for completed work was awarded to Rongrong Fan for "Loss of corepressor GPS2 sensitizes macrophage activation upon metabolic stress in obesity
and type-2 diabetes" and best poster for most promising project to Jennifer Jager for "Contribution of non-coding RNAs expressed by Kupffer cells in insulin resistance".

A recap from the 2015 retreat

On May 21-22 the retreat took place at Djurönäset, bit further out in the Stockholm Archipelago. A good number of the KI research community in diabetes and metabolism turned up and interacted with as many as 9 external speakers; Zach Gerhart-Hines (Denmark), Riita Lahesmaa (Finland), Olle Korsgren (Uppsala), Iris Shai (Israel), Ulf Riserus (Uppsala), Paul Njolstad (Norway), Anders Rosengren (Lund), Christian Benedict (Uppsala) and Suzanne Dickson (Göteborg) who presented on topics like circadian rhythm, type 1 diabetes, human genetics in diabetes and CNS regulation of metabolism. There were also several excellent talks by internal speakers, see the program for 2015.

Leandro Agudelo once again got the most votes for best short talk “Kynurenic Acid activates a beige fat program and increases
systemic energy expenditure”; while Thais de Castro Barbosa was awarded best poster for completed work "Paternal chronic high-fat diet consumption reprograms the gametic epigenome and induces transgenerational inheritance of metabolic disorder" and Amanda Klein was awarded best poster for most promising work "PGC-1α1 activators: Towards a new generation of drugs for metabolic disease"

The interactions included socializing at the dance floor helped by a live band as well as contemplating on new insights at the beautiful archipelago sunset.

A recap from the 2014 Retreat

Thank you to all of the participants in this years SRP Diabetes – EndoMet retreat! Your contributions that made this a very successful and inspiring meeting.

In particular, we would like to thank all of the speakers for their time and for sharing their research. We were also very pleased that so many people presented posters and we appreciate their effort. Judging by the crowd and discussions by the posters it went very well (in fact it was hard to make people leave the posters for the dinner!)

We would like to congratulate the following people again on their awards:

Teresa Daraio and Ismael Valladolid-Acebes were awarded for best poster for completed work for their poster entitled ”Insulin resistance and impaired rotarod performance in SNAP-25b deficient mice”

Karin Åvall was awarded for best poster for most promising project for her poster entitled “Decreasing apolipoprotein CIII reduces the harmful effects of high fat diet!”

Leandro Agudelo was awarded the best short talk award with 31 % of the votes for his talk “Skeletal Muscle PGC-1α1and Stress-induced Depression”

Thais de Castro Barbosa came in second place with 17% of the votes for her talk “Identification of epigenetic carriers for paternal inheritance of metabolic disorders in rats”

Ismael Valladolid-Acebes came in third place with 15% of the votes for his talk “SNAP-25b deficiency increase the vulnerability to diabesity and mood disorders

We greatly appreciate the feedback we received, which is crucial for us to improve the retreat. Overall everyone seemed very satisfied, but we will definitely consider your grades, your many comments and ideas when planning next year’s retreat.

A recap from the 2013 Retreat

Retreat in 2013 witnessed an all time high with 165 people registered and around 150 participants! We are grateful to all participants who made this to a very enjoyable and stimulating event. We especially want to thank all the speakers within the program and externally from KI, and for those travelling from other cities coming from Umeå University, Uppsala University and Gothenburg University. We also appreciate all people presenting posters.

We want to highlight some of the excellent work (both science and ability to present) by our younger colleagues for which three awards were given out at the retreat; Joanna Hård in the category best poster for finished project: ”Bone Marrow Contribution to Human Adipogenesis”; Carole Muller in the category best poster for unfinished project: ”The non-hematopoietic erythropoietin analogue, ARA290, improves glucose tolerance by stimulating insulin secretion in spontaneously type2 diabetic Goto-Kakizaki rats.” and Jorge Correia for best short talk presentation “Role of FXR isoforms in hepatic glucose and lipid metabolism”.

The received feedback is great help for us and which revealed that the participants were overall very satisfied. Some comments were brought up such as improvement of the poster session (largest so far for our retreats) and some of the speaker formats which we certainly will consider for the retreat in 2014.